Home: Welcome

If you haven't visited this site before, before clicking anything, please read this whole page.

It's not long, and it explains a few things...

...like bits...

...and the amazing underweb...

...and the mysterious utility wizard.

Understanding these things will really help.

Ultimately, reading this page will not only help you understand this site, it may leave you with a certain lightness of spirit, and an agreeable sense of the possibility of all things.

Home bit

To make it easier to find things, this website is divided into bits. At the moment, you are in the home bit.

The home bit includes:

News

News-a-mation telling you what's changed here at www.mannyneira.com, why it's changed, and what you should think about it! Don't be a fact-baby: read the news!

Socky

Here you can read the blog of Socky, my recalcitrant sock puppet. Please be aware that while Socky looks cute, he is an erratic depressive, shown here out of his mind on uppers: for a sock puppet he is generally truculent, misanthropic, and bloody-minded.

MNC24

MNC24 is mannyneira.com's 24 hours psychic news service. Tune in any time of the day or night to find out what is happening live from experienced presenters Natasha Kaplisky, Fiona Bruce, and Kirsty Young.

Links

The links page lists the addresses of other websites which are either related to this one, or just somehow interesting.

Contact

From the contact page you can drop me a line to discuss the ideas explained on the site, tell me about a particularly interesting chicken you saw today, send me pornographic pictures of yourself, just say 'hello', or do all four.

Other bits

Computers bit

For most of my life I have made a living by programming computers or training people in their use, and I still take an interest in technology. Visit the computers bit if you are, you know, interested in computers. It includes complete training courses in HTML & CSS (web pages), C, and the lovable but little known management system Universe.

Nations bit

"When humanity has truly grown up, it will look back on this division of the world into states, and the restriction of the right of humans to travel, live, and work where they wish, as a kind of world apartheid." In the nations bit, you will read more arguments like this for internationalism, and some examples of micronationalism, including the national website of Mania, the smallest country in the world, and the website of the Ministry of Undisclosable Purpose, which just does what needs to be done.

Ideas bit

A secular humanist, materialist, and libertarian socialist, I should have collected enough old political journalism (largely from the Weekly Worker and Red Star) and philosophical essays here to save the police the trouble of ripping apart my home looking for evidence to try me on should legislative attacks on freedom of speech continue.

UnderWeb

UnderWeb is a piece of software I developed to help me avoid having to make a decision.

I couldn't decide how I wanted this website to look: whether it should be light or dark, or whether the menus should stay still while you scrolled the pages, or whether they should move up and down with the text, or... well, you get the idea.

So in the end, I wrote this thing called UnderWeb, which provides a choice of styles, so you can decide for yourself. On every page, you'll find a little menu under the title UnderWeb, and with options like black, boxy, and news. Clicking on these wont change the contents of the page - the words and pictures will all remain exactly the same - but it will change the way they are displayed.

The problem is, once you've found the menu and changed the style, under the new style the menu will be somewhere else: sometimes right at the bottom of the page. This can be a bit bewildering, but do experiment to see which style you like best.

If you want to find out more about UnderWeb, you can find it in the UnderWeb Guide. This explains how the system works, and even how you can download it and use it to build your own UnderWeb based sites: UnderWeb is free software, distributed under GNU General Public License.

A brief FAQ

Q. But Manny, who is the 'mysterious utility wizard'?

A. I, Manny Neira, am the mysterious utility wizard.

Q. I see. And what does that mean?

A. If I told you that, it wouldn't be mysterious.

Enjoy the site.

Manny NeiraThe mysterious utility wizard
Friday, 3rd February 2006

Web rings

www.mannyneira.com...

...the mysterious utility wizard...

...is proud to be a member of the following web rings:

The Ring

A ring for everyone - bringing together websites of all kinds in one of the largest ring communities on the net. "One ring to link them all, and on the web, bind them..."